Scality Achieves Another Record Year With Bookings Growth of 500%

San Francisco, CA – January 29, 2014 – Scality, an industry leader in petabyte-scale storage, announced that 2013 was a year of significant business and product expansion, highlighted by the company’s year over year bookings growth of 500%, the addition of twelve major customers, significant product enhancements broadening the range of applications for Scality’s RING, major industry recognition and a $22M Series C investment.

Customers and Markets

Over the course of 2013, Scality consolidated its strong position in existing markets and entered new markets. Scality extended its market leadership in providing mission-critical storage infrastructure for the largest email service providers. Scality now supplies petabyte-scale storage to twenty service providers, each of whom manages more than one million mailboxes. In the aggregate, Scality now manages critical information assets for more than 110 million users. Scality’s first customer, Telenet, deployed Scality in 2010. Since then, Telenet has experienced 100% storage availability, and has had zero data loss or corruption. The system has remained fully operational, even after a complete replacement of Telenet’s hardware, a 10x increase in storage and many application and architecture upgrades and replacements.

Scality’s success in the Service Provider market demonstrates the ability of Scality’s software defined storage, based on object storage technology, to provide 24×7 availability and full data protection, year after year, at a very low cost of operations, even for mission-critical Internet services.
Beyond its established position with email and Cloud service providers, in 2013 the company made inroads in new markets, including Financial Services as well as Media and Entertainment. And the company closed its first significant deals in Japan, expanding its presence beyond the USA and Western Europe.
Product Innovation

In 2013 Scality made significant engineering investments in its Ring software solution. While dozens of capabilities were added or enhanced, three are particularly noteworthy for their broad implications for Scality’s markets and technology vision.

Native support for a broad range of industry standard file sharing protocols. With the October Release 4.2 of Scality’s RING, Scality added native support for standard enterprise file systems including NFS and CIFS. Scality has extended its data protection and storage management benefits, including replication, erasure coding and disaster recovery to data stored in traditional enterprise formats. Release 4.2 provides interoperability among NFS, CIFS and REST APIs, so that data stored in NFS or CIFS can be accessed using a modern REST API and data stored using a REST API can be accessed via NFS or CIFS.

Unified Storage. In March, the company shipped a key component of its unified storage vision, a plug-in for OpenStack Cinder, providing support for persistent block storage. Scality now provides block, file and object storage, all from within the same storage management architecture.

The impact of these product innovations taken together is that in 2013 Scality broadened the conventional views of what could be expected from the Object Storage industry. In addition to powering some of the industry’s largest Cloud infrastructure applications, Scality’s Ring easily interoperates with traditional applications, delivering massive capacity for a fraction of the cost of conventional storage systems, without compromising performance for Internet services or other massively parallel workloads.

Industry Recognition

Scality achieved frequent recognition over the course of 2013 for the company’s technology leadership and business progress.

• In April, Scality was one of five storage companies named by Gartner to its prestigious Cool Vendor list. Gartner recognizing Scality, because, Scality “can potentially deliver massive scalability, high availability and data protection at lower costs.”
• In September, GigaOM released an assessment comparing the leading Object Storage vendors and identified Scality as the best object storage solution for performance, scalability and cost. Comparing Scality to the three other market-leading Object Storage solutions, the report concluded, “Scality currently does an overall better job and does so at the lowest TCO.”
• In October, IDC issued its 2013 Object Storage MarketScape and named Scality to its Object Storage “Leader” category after evaluating thirteen vendors against more than ten different criteria. The report noted Scality’s unique multi-geo capabilities, which enable the RING “to deliver a high level of service availability and data durability.” The report also noted, “Scality knows and understands the OBS [object storage] market segment better than anyone else.”
• In October, The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) released the results of a detailed, hands-on validation of the performance of Scality RING 4.2, examining performance, throughput, high availability, data protection and data recovery. ESG concluded that across all benchmarks, Scality’s results demonstrated a highly efficient solution, “that met the performance and latency requirements of enterprise class organizations.”

Organizational Development

In 2013, Scality invested in new engineering initiatives, saw increased interest in petabyte-scale solutions from a variety of vertical markets and technology partners, increased its sales activity and supported more than twelve new major deployments. Given Scality’s continued investment in these areas, over the course of 2013, Scality doubled the size of its team and expanded its executive staff, including the hiring of Erwan Menard as Chief Operating Officer (joined in January 2014), Philippe Mechanick as Chief Financial Officer, and Antoine Fauvel as Senior Director of European Sales.

To support the company’s continued business growth, in July Scality closed a $22M Series C financing round, led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital, with participation BPI France and all of Scality’s existing investors, including Idinvest Partners, OMNES Capital and Galileo Partners. The funds are intended to further investments in new technology, customer support and market development initiatives. Given Scality’s strong 2013 results, the company has been able to invest significantly in these areas without using the proceeds from this new financing round.

“Four years ago, Scality’s founders placed a ‘make-or-break’ bet that the approach taken by Google, Amazon and Facebook would spread and become the dominant architecture for IT,” said Jerome Lecat, CEO of Scality. “We expect small and medium sized companies to leverage public cloud services, while large enterprise will have enough economies of scale to control and operate their own private cloud. Our vision is that time-sensitive storage will be in silicon and very close to compute resources, while all other storage, for things such as documents, video, Big Data, archive and sensor data will be deployed on standard servers managed by intelligent software, an approach now known as Software-Defined-Storage. In many ways, 2013 allowed us to validate our bet, and the company is now gearing up for expansion.”